Pleasures of the Literary Meal

A pleasure of the literary meal is to stare at someone in the act of eating. It draws attention to the unseemly fact that eating is a bodily function—like animals, we are trapped by our hunger, but we do our best to disguise their effects, like disguising a cold cough when going out for a walk with your friend or hiding a nasty cut like so many people with a mask like this guy on his face.

This year was the first in a long time where my appetite for reading and writing dwindled a bit as I sat down every day to work on my novel called My First Book, which follows an orphaned boy named Sibbald. This story’s central character is a young black boy struggling to deal with racism in school. He wants desperately to read books

—I think he just needs the right books to tell him all about how wonderful life can be as opposed to what the real world has to offer in the way books have portrayed it for so long. But more often than not he finds himself disappointed in everything he reads, especially when he tries to read something with themes of race. As much as I would love to read anything by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, I found myself frustrated at some of them. And so I started to study more literature, even though I didn’t think of it as a form of escapism or anything like that. Instead of studying art on one hand, like most of us, I studied philosophy on the other hand, just because I liked studying a subject like this. And as I started reading more and more books with these themes, I started appreciating the things I read that really meant something to me—like Derrida’s “The essayist and the audience”- and The Godfather by Mario Puzo where there were stories about religion in the book. As much as I hated reading the ones I used to write, I now realize how valuable writing is to everyone who thinks they need something other than words to talk to each other about. What about those of us who don’t want a lot of words? Maybe it’s why a certain writer doesn’t always make good stories. Maybe like many others—like JK Rowling for instance—she doesn’t always get enough time to express herself through her writing even though she is an incredible writer. Maybe her best works came after she became successful and had lots of money. Maybe one day she will become famous for her writing like her father once did. For me though, my favorite authors are Mozart’s Sonatas and Whitman’s Leaves among others. We know that literature is a form of expression, and in order to create great poetry, it’s essential to have a perfect understanding of a poem. That’s why every poem has its own purpose. Like Shakespeare once said, Poetry is the greatest medicine. Now let’s talk about another type of medicine, and that may be quite true for the author, too—writing is good for the soul. In addition, the thing about poems is that the reader can find meaning or insight into yourself at the end of a sentence. That’s very similar to what a doctor (or any professional like doctors) could find out in an exam…

                                            Image by Sasin Tipchai from Pixabay

I found myself obsessed with reading novels like Moby Dick by Herman Melville and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, two masterpieces of American Literature that really inspired me. They are both timeless classics from their times but written nearly a century apart. Both stories describe how different states of mind can affect human behavior. But while Moby Dick tells the tale of Captain Ahab who commits heinous acts of savagery against his crew, Jane Eyre shows a young girl whose heart goes out for her cousin Rochester and falls in love with him despite her parents' attempts to prevent her from doing so. At the same time, both Jane Eyre and Moby Dick deal with deep emotional issues, as each character struggles to cope with grief or jealousy due to something else in history.

But the relationship between the main characters in both stories and their settings is quite complex. There are no hard and fast rules of course, but at the same time, they both depict events in America around the same period. There are elements of tragedy and suffering in the lives of both men and women. Though there are also elements of hope and light in the novel when things aren’t going well, they both feel hopeless, and sometimes even angry. Just like in life, if things go wrong, it feels awful. And it’s almost the case in Jane Eyre too. Everything is full of problems and darkness. On the other side, Mary gets over her fear and insecurity after finding the truth—and when she finally realizes that she loves Rochester and she can’t live without him, because she is unable to cope without him. She even says in the third paragraph that she can no longer be alone. She loves him so much and so completely. And as soon as the story ends, she walks out of the room to continue being with him until the next evening. And then he walks out of the room to his wife in the bedroom, saying a prayer for them and looking at them—and then they start walking towards the town together.

Both stories seem to take place in places that seemed impossible, and yet they are not. They are set in historical American cities, and the setting is made even more beautiful in such settings due to an abundance of color. So the only way a person can see themselves in the novel and the novel itself would be through the eyes of either a white man or woman. By using the city to show something otherworldly and fantastic, Shakespeare shows us his mind and imagination through the use of colors and lighting to give meaning to his work. Similarly, Moby Dick uses the sea and mountains to symbolize some parts of nature with the protagonist John Smith, and Jane Eyre uses the landscape itself. The scene in the opening is a picture of New York City. When things don’t go according to plan, the scenes can turn bleak as it depicts death itself. And both Jane Eyre and Hawke Smith are able to escape reality and leave behind the things people think are important, and just move on with the plot. And just like in ‘A Dream Deferred’, John Smith cannot go back in time and change what happened.

In conclusion, these two books take place in American cities during the 19th century, and both narrate the story of two different young people who struggled with being a part of a lower social class. There is hope in both, but there are also moments of sadness, and each character faces difficulty. Likewise, unlike A Dream Deferred and The Great Gatsby, these two pieces of literature are still relevant nowadays. Whether people want to read them or not is up to them (it depends on whether their taste in literature matches mine). They can help anyone understand themselves, and they can help many authors understand themselves better. Maybe through reading it, they can be better writers like me, and maybe through seeing it, they can understand themselves more. Then we can appreciate our lives together.